Tag: Restaurant Review

I had lunch at the culinary mecca Chez Panisse Cafe in Berkeley with Kris on August 22, 2008. Just getting around to blogging about the experience now.

Eggplant and cherry tomato salad with walnuts and marjoram

We shared this salad as our starter. A perfect opening to our summer luncheon. All the produce was perfectly fresh worked together in harmony. The eggplant was melt-in-your mouth tender, with its spongelike texture soaking up the olive oil in the vinaigrette.

Side order of anchovies

I LOVE oily fish. We ordered these to munch on and to go with our bread and butter while we waited for our main courses. Unlike your everyday canned anchovies, these babies were meaty and fresh-tasting, not just oily and salty.

Our server, Andrew informed us that there was a delay with our main courses (below) due to unspecified “fish issues,” so we just leisurely noshed on anchovies and bread and sipped our cava (nothing quite like bubbly in the afternoon, or any other time for that matter).

California white sea bass with green beans, saffron, tomato and aïoli

I guess in unpretentious California, “haricots verts” are just plain green beans. But I’m glad they said “aïoli” and not “garlic mayonaise,” which I guess is literally what it is, but just doesn’t sound as tasty. The aïoli was fantastic, I wish I could have a vat of that stuff to schmear on bread or to dunk french fries (“pommes frites” if you want to continue in the Francophone theme) in. I would probaby would have licked the creamy, garlicky aïoli off the plate if I had not been in a restaurant. Seriously, that good.

Wood oven-roasted squid and pimientos with rosemary and garlic

Our other main dish was also in the South of France meets California theme. The little roasted pimientos were adorable and the squid perfectly tender. At this point I was in heaven. You really can’t go wrong with the holy trinity of fresh seafood, garlic and wine. I’m drooling just thinking about this meal as I blog about it.

Andrew offered to give us a free dessert, so we went ahead and ordered two:

Plum tart with cardamom ice cream

Bittersweet chocolate pavé with hazelnut cream

The chocolate pavé is like a flour-less brownie, but much better than a brownie. Chocolatey goodness. The plum tart was amazing too. Some of the best buttery tart crust I have ever tasted.

The fruit was at the peak of freshness. It was my first time trying mulberries and a pluot. The mulberries reminded me of blackberries. The plot is a hybrid of 3/4 plum and 1/4 apricot. A perfect finish to a sublime meal.

A mediocre Japanese gastropub (izakaya) in the East Village. Located behind Ramen Setagaya in the space formerly occupied by Pasta/Sushi Wafu and Oriental Spoon before that.

Kris and I went last night (4 June 2008) after the Forum on Participation and Politics Online at NYU Law School. We walked by the crowded izakayas on St. Mark’s Place, including the ever-popular Yakitori Taisho and Kenka. We were starving and didn’t want to wait, so we kept walking eastwards. We stumbled upon Oni and decided to give it a try despite the fact that it was nearly empty.

We had the daikon & kani (fake crab) salad, which was passable, but a little bit of a tacky guilty pleasure. We also had an order of hokke (grilled salted atka mackerel) and fried oysters. The oysters were gigantic, but not in a good way – a little too much breading and a bit burnt. The hokke was ok too, but really, it’s pretty hard to mess up, since the fish usually comes already salt cured and frozen in a vacuum pack. All you need to do is defrost and “grill” in the toaster oven. Luckily, we had $2.50 Kirin draft beers to wash everything down. We would have had 2 beers each, but settled with one, because the waitresses were so remarkably inattentive, walking right by us several times without checking on us, despite the fact that there were only 2 other people in the restaurant at the time.

Given the ghosts of 2 failed restaurants that haunt this hidden-away-behind Ramen Setagaya space, I am giving Izakaya Oni 3 or 4 months before it goes bust.